Infinite Loop —

Parallels Desktop 6: The Ars Review

For decades, Apple users have dreamed of playing Windows games on their Macs …

It has been less than ten months since we reviewed Parallels Desktop 5, a competent but buggy release from Parallels. Shipping paid updates with stability issues seems to be the company's modus operandi, so I was a little skeptical when I saw that a new version was already being released, since the last one had so many issues that needed ironing out. The feature list of Parallels Desktop 6 isn't what I'd call ambitious—the main focus of version 6 has been on the 64-bit host and increased speed, mostly for 3D and gaming. Gaming was already Parallels' forte, but I was curious to see if the new version would finally make playing modern games with complex shaders, high resolutions, and high-quality audio a reality. If it doesn't come through, and suffers from stability issues, this could be a disastrous release for Parallels. Read on for the verdict.

Interface changes

Most of the interface changes in Parallels Desktop 6 are subtle tweaks, but they make the application feel more polished overall. The new VM Library window has a slight transparency-with-blur effect over the background:

Resuming and suspending VMs overlays a similar charcoal gray and glass feel:

When you attach a USB device, a slick little window pops up:

This consistent feel makes the whole Parallels experience a little slicker and more in keeping with Apple's interface design. This is also helped by changes to...

That icon

I don't think many applications have received as much hate over an icon change as Parallels has. How bad is it? Well, I noticed this when searching for installation info for Parallels:

When your icon is so contentious that it's trumping "install" and "increase memory" for support questions, I think it's safe to say people don't like it. I was no fan either—just look at this thing:

The Parallels Desktop 5 icon: Bob, the Not-So-Competent Builder. The Mac looks bad and I've made more stylish colored lines by missing with the ketchup bottle.

The updated icon attempts to right some of the wrongs, while keeping the "parallel lines" motif:

Honestly, no matter how much power you can harness with a VM, native is always going to be better. I could put up with a VM for non-gaming stuff, but for games, there are often just too many incompatabilities beyond framerate that unfortunately make Boot Camp the only way to go (stuff with mouse and misrendered graphics).

I do wonder if this means that Windows Media Center performance has improved. It would be nice to know if I could watch HDTV on a separate monitor inside a VM. Any way you could test that?

What are you talking about with Crystal mode being gone? It's still there, but it's now a pref for the VM under Coherence (as it should have been; the difference between the two modes is minimal and more correctly akin to a preference).

Without comparison to running native, why should we just accept that the speed is near native? With only 256MB of video memory available to VMs, that can't possibly be the case for many modern games.

About all this article told me is that Parallels is faster than Fusion but more buggy, which I knew anyway. It told me nothing useful about whether buying Parallels is a good alternative to dual booting.

I'm curious; if you're making the claim that Parallels 6 provides "near-native" speeds, why didn't you actually run the benchmarks natively in a Windows partition? A couple of other niggles: You often say "(Geforce GTX 285/Radeon 4870 tested)" but don't really go into any more detail; there's a not-insignificant difference between those two cards. Also, in the WiC review, you have a graph marked as "1440x900 Medium Quality" that shows 20 FPS for PD5, then int he blurb you say performance in PD5 was "Good overall at 1920x1200 in high and very quality modes." I'm not sure how since the game was already well below playable at 1440x900/medium quality.

Overall a very in-depth review that unfortunately doesn't actually address the concern of whether PD6 attains near-native performance, despite the header. Glad to see PD6 is more stable at least.

If Mac users want to use PC software, then it is quite possible that they should buy a PC. All these Mac users tout their precious machine, but if it doesn't meet your needs, then they should change what they use.

If Mac users want to use PC software, then it is quite possible that they should buy a PC. All these Mac users tout their precious machine, but if it doesn't meet your needs, then they should change what they use.

Your trolling is unwanted.

This has nothing to do with not having a PC, the author's computer can boot directly into windows and run everything just fine (it has 8 cores and 24 GB RAM it can run pretty much anything), this about running some windows applications within Mac OS, so you don't have to reboot.

If Mac users want to use PC software, then it is quite possible that they should buy a PC. All these Mac users tout their precious machine, but if it doesn't meet your needs, then they should change what they use.

The real question here is if the time machine you just stepped out of only goes in one direction or whether we can actually send you back to 1988.

Cool Review. And btw you should make video reviews of games. After reading this I have a strong urge to play Half-Life2 again. Amazing game. And competent play style. Nothing worse than someone demoing a game a sucking at it.

Question: what actual benefit does having higher end graphics cards make, when what's being provided to the VM is a virtualized card with only 256MB vram?

Does the virtual video card actually utilize the higher end card's features? I always assumed the virtual video card was written to emulate a baseline video card, so graphics performance would be the same regardless of the actual hardware video card installed.

I'm already planning on upgrading my GT120 to a Radeon 5770, but I wasn't expecting my VM graphics performance to get better as well.

And yes, it's a travesty that the VMs are limited to 256MB. We can give them all 4 hyperthreaded cores of the CPU, and most of the RAM, but only a minimal amount for vram?

Oh also were you testing these games with your Boot Camp install being the VM guest, or was it a purely VM guest?

I'm having the same issue as some other people here. How can you suggest closer to native performance from P6 when you don't test against Windows running natively on the same machine?

First, the 256MB limitation for VRAM is outrageous. Only the oldest of 3D titles (or crippling modern games texture settings) would ever be able to run under that little VRAM in the resolutions required for native operation on modern LCD monitors. Newer titles would literally be starving for access to that pithy volume of memory and performance would tank due to use of system RAM versus significantly faster/higher bandwidth GDDR.

Secondly is compatibility. As another user stated, just because you can get Windows up and running doesn't mean you can necessarily get a game up and running via emulation. Take the SCUMMVM emulator as a prime example. Games have ratings based on how well they work with that software emulator for Lucas Arts old Adventure titles (Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, Full Throttle - as examples). The ratings pretty much run the gamut from 100% perfection to 0% don't even bother. Most games have small quirks here and there and some can even be game breaking. Emulation will always be such. So, how about running a suite of the most popular PC titles and run them long enough to see if any compatibility issues crop up?

Case in point - As a quick test of some other games, I tried the Mafia 2 demo, but both Parallels Desktop 5 and 6 refused to run it. After that, I loaded up Mass Effect 2 and jacked up all the settings. It's not a very graphically impressive game, so I was expecting performance to be very good. I wasn't disappointed, and everything ran smoothly at 1920x1200. There were visible shader glitches, though:

If you work in 3D or want to play Windows game, this is an essential upgrade

I don't agree. If you work in 3D (CAD/CAM, animation - etc) I can definitely understand the desire to run in one OS and emulate others as needed to stay inside the native MacOS. For gaming? What's the need? Why wouldn't you simply run Windows natively via Bootcamp from a separate partition? No emulation will ever truly be able to match the compatibility or performance of running native. And with gaming, I see no real reason you'd need access to the MacOS while playing a game for Windows. If you're gaming you're not really worried about productivity after all.

I also have to question this - If you're using an i3 iMac with 5670 or above, you'd probably better performance on that machine than I did my on my 4870-sporting Xeon Mac Pro.

The 5670 will consume less power and supports DX11. However, it is not faster than the 4870 in either DX9 or DX10 rendering. Not by a long shot. The 5670 is right at the higher end of entry level/beginning of mid level (you can readily find them around $99.00) while the 4870 is an enthusiast level card (even as old as it is, it still retails for between $130.00 - $170.00).

If Mac users want to use PC software, then it is quite possible that they should buy a PC. All these Mac users tout their precious machine, but if it doesn't meet your needs, then they should change what they use.

Honestly, no matter how much power you can harness with a VM, native is always going to be better. I could put up with a VM for non-gaming stuff, but for games, there are often just too many incompatabilities beyond framerate that unfortunately make Boot Camp the only way to go (stuff with mouse and misrendered graphics).

This is it really that hard to dual boot? I can see it and use Vm's all the time for many different purposes, however games is not one of them. PC gaming is crazy with compatibility issues to begin with, which is partly why its not the platform it used to be.

I can be in windows 7 in around a minute on a raid array, which is slower to boot than a ssd. I don't see why people even bother to try in Mac of Linux.

Question: what actual benefit does having higher end graphics cards make, when what's being provided to the VM is a virtualized card with only 256MB vram?

I am pretty sure the way these things work is to translate these 3D calls down to your existing card if possible, not emulate them in software. This means if you have a better card it can execute the 3D rendering commands from the VM faster then an older card.

On paper, superior performance means bootcamp for gaming. In the real world, convenience trumps performance every day and twice on Sunday. Especially on games where one can disable eye candy to keep responsiveness good enough to be immersed.

I'm a vmware user so I haven't done any satisfying gaming in vm, but I have played several multiplatform games and I consistently find myself playing the Mac side because it's quicker to get into a game as well as quicker to resume the drab post-game existence... And it's surprising the graphical trade offs I'm willing to tolerate, I wouldn't have expected it but there it is...

Is anyone having problems with running Java software ? One could argue that I'd should run the app in MacOS X and you'd be right. However, when testing our app in Parallels 6 - because I'd hoped it would be faster - I found that it only draws white or black screens. Using bootcamp : no probs, using P5 : no problems.

I'm curious; if you're making the claim that Parallels 6 provides "near-native" speeds, why didn't you actually run the benchmarks natively in a Windows partition?

This. I came looking for this. Where is it.

Perhaps one reason against is that Windows (being the anti-piracy activation laden bollocks that it is) detects Parallels' virtual hardware as "significantly" different to the "native" hardware in Boot Camp and requires you to use up a licence activation on each time you swap from BC -> Virtual? Unless that was a bug in Parallels 4 and I've just not bothered since

I'm curious; if you're making the claim that Parallels 6 provides "near-native" speeds, why didn't you actually run the benchmarks natively in a Windows partition?

This. I came looking for this. Where is it.

Perhaps one reason against is that Windows (being the anti-piracy activation laden bollocks that it is) detects Parallels' virtual hardware as "significantly" different to the "native" hardware in Boot Camp and requires you to use up a licence activation on each time you swap from BC -> Virtual? Unless that was a bug in Parallels 4 and I've just not bothered since

A technology reporting site like Ars should surly have more than one license for Windows. Honestly, that's a pretty lame excuse unless you're one person running a website out of their garage.

When your preview paragraph reads: For decades, Apple users have dreamed of playing Windows games on their Macs at near-native speeds. At long last, Parallels 6 realizes that dream. Benchmarks inside.

You need to actually compare native results to those of the VM used. If you don't, there's no baseline to make any conclusion other than P6 runs games better than P5. A conclusion which has no bearing on the supposition that gaming on P6 is nearly on par with gaming on Windows natively.

To punctuate this, running Crysis with medium settings at 1440x900 ( http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/20 ... view.ars/8 ) and seeing only 36.2 FPS average with 8 2.66GHz Xeon cores 24GB RAM and equipped with a HD4870 graphics card isn't really near native performance. With a HD4870 and a 3.33GHz Core 2 Extreme I can push a higher framerate at 1920x1200 with all graphical options at their maximum (generally in the high 40's). This is why this article needed a baseline comparison with Windows running natively via Bootcamp on the same hardware.

A great review from Ars. Reviews like this make me feel happy about my premium subscription. Keep up the good work.

Parallels 6 is definitely a very nice upgrade. It now makes Boot Camp almost unnecessary. I say almost because as some people have suggested we will always need some extra boost, especially for the newest intensive 3D titles. Nevertheless, for most uses it's great. I'm looking forward to VMware's response now. Only a few weeks ago they covered the gap of 3D performance with an update. Now it seems they are falling back again. This is good, cause such neck-to-neck competition gives us better and more complete products all the time.

I only hope the upgrade/update price is lower in the future. Especially if they continue to bring us new versions every year.

I don't agree. If you work in 3D (CAD/CAM, animation - etc) I can definitely understand the desire to run in one OS and emulate others as needed to stay inside the native MacOS. For gaming? What's the need? Why wouldn't you simply run Windows natively via Bootcamp from a separate partition? No emulation will ever truly be able to match the compatibility or performance of running native. And with gaming, I see no real reason you'd need access to the MacOS while playing a game for Windows. If you're gaming you're not really worried about productivity after all.

Because rebooting sucks? I keep a half-dozen to a dozen apps open at all times, generally with 10-100 tabs/documents open in several. Setting that environment back up every time the system crashes (generally from standby hangs) is irritating enough, doing it just for a half-hour gaming session would be maddening. Some allow you to restore tabs, some you have to reopen manually. If you could reliably hibernate your way back and forth it wouldn't be so bad, but I have had so crashes, hangs, or corrupted states trying to do it that I just don't ever bother. Having performance that's close enough to native to enjoy a few games is more important than actual native performance in bootcamp for me. I like to come back from a game and have my environment just like I left it. Apparently there are plenty like me, because Parallels keeps getting bought.

I do respect that you're willing to make the extra effort for the extra fps, just answering your question.

Having performance that's close enough to native to enjoy a few games is more important than actual native performance in bootcamp for me.

How do you know performance is anywhere near native? Ars provided no benchmarks to prove anything of the sort. My own experience with my Windows PC tells me performance isn't anywhere near native. Too bad this benchmark review tells us absolutely nothing other than P5 is slower than P6 and VMWare isn't a gaming VM.

Could have done with a direct comparison of games (eg: Portal) vs the new native MacSteam... That would have been the ideal. Any chance of appending something along those lines quickly? Otherwise, interesting to see such significant progress.

Referring to your Wacom mouse issue: I have never had a good experience gaming with a Wacom mouse on a native Windows machine. In particular, if I used the scroll wheel to change weapons in Half-Life: it would spin my character around while scrolling through weapon options. I was never sure why that would happen.

I don't agree. If you work in 3D (CAD/CAM, animation - etc) I can definitely understand the desire to run in one OS and emulate others as needed to stay inside the native MacOS. For gaming? What's the need? Why wouldn't you simply run Windows natively via Bootcamp from a separate partition? No emulation will ever truly be able to match the compatibility or performance of running native. And with gaming, I see no real reason you'd need access to the MacOS while playing a game for Windows. If you're gaming you're not really worried about productivity after all.

Because rebooting sucks? I keep a half-dozen to a dozen apps open at all times, generally with 10-100 tabs/documents open in several. Setting that environment back up every time the system crashes (generally from standby hangs) is irritating enough, doing it just for a half-hour gaming session would be maddening. Some allow you to restore tabs, some you have to reopen manually. If you could reliably hibernate your way back and forth it wouldn't be so bad, but I have had so crashes, hangs, or corrupted states trying to do it that I just don't ever bother. Having performance that's close enough to native to enjoy a few games is more important than actual native performance in bootcamp for me. I like to come back from a game and have my environment just like I left it. Apparently there are plenty like me, because Parallels keeps getting bought.

I do respect that you're willing to make the extra effort for the extra fps, just answering your question.

Amen. Though my Mac is quite anemic and even booting direct to Windows is too slow for most games, but I do plan to upgrade soon so it's good to know the state of the art.

Would also like to chime in that it's lazy to claim "near-native" speeds when all the benchmarks are only versus other VM solutions. Yes the new Parallels looks awesome, but you've made a huge unsubstantiated claim right off the bat. Excellent write-up otherwise, but that bit is just sloppy.

I haven't done nearly as much thorough testing as this review, but I will say that running Civ 5 (full game) in Parallels 6 on my 2010 Mac Pro with the 5870 I haven't experienced the glitches that were shown here. It's worked surprisingly well in Direct X 9 mode, with a respectable frame rate.

I've also been running Dragon Age: Origins with similar success. The only game that has given me major difficulty has been Lord of the Rings Online, which actually loads and plays at an incredibly stable frame rate by for some reason goes all buggery with mouse input, direction, speed etc. Hopefully they can fix that with a patch because right now I can't figure out why that's occurring.

Having said that, I've been using VMware Fusion 3 since release with my Boot Camp partition and it has been stable, reliable and not corrupted or caused issues. Since I've been trying Parallels 6 it has twice required chkdisk to run to repair the drive when loading up native Boot Camp.

It's impressive to say the least, but I wouldn't trust an important VM to it right now. Fun to play around with though.

I haven't done nearly as much thorough testing as this review, but I will say that running Civ 5 (full game) in Parallels 6 on my 2010 Mac Pro with the 5870 I haven't experienced the glitches that were shown here. It's worked surprisingly well in Direct X 9 mode, with a respectable frame rate..

i really don't want to hear i can play Civ 5 on my mac. if so i'll be flushing days down the drain.

Yeah, not that it matters to me really, (so why are you commenting John? I don't know...) but I did wonder about the near native gaming speed thing. I can see that you got decent speed, perfectly acceptable, playable speed, but that doesn't mean anything in terms of comparing to native performance. A quad Xeon with 24GB of RAM should get some pretty stonking speed, no matter what!

I have a real interest in more detail on the dolby 5.1. In both mac and PCs, unless you have something called Dolby Digital Live on your sound card, the only thing 5.1 (via Toslink) is good for is media with AC3 pre encoded. Dolby would not hand out a licence for the OS or software to actually generate Dolby Digital 5.1 streams, so all games were pretty much just surround sound.

If you are running parallels and using 5.1 in the VM, and outputting it to the Host OS who is then sending it to Toslink, do you run into the same situation? Can you actually get discrete 5.1 out of a game even though you are laking 5.1 Dolby Live hardware? If so this would be huge and a end run around the Dolby licensing issues.

Very thorough review, but as others have mentioned with one massive, glaring omission - native benchmarks. Why you didn't use bootcamp and compareit natively, when that was the comparison mentioned several times in the article, is bizarre.

If Mac users want to use PC software, then it is quite possible that they should buy a PC. All these Mac users tout their precious machine, but if it doesn't meet your needs, then they should change what they use.

For decades, Apple users have dreamed of playing Windows games on their Macs at near-native speeds. At long last, Parallels 6 realizes that dream. Benchmarks inside

Yet the article has no native benchmarks to demonstrate the claim of "near-native" speeds. GPU coverage by Ars has been VERY poor this week--boarding on hypersensational. First was the claim that a GPU that can setup 200M triangles was nearly as fast as the PS3's RSX GPU which has a peak setup rate of 275M triangles (1 vertex every 2 clocks @ 550MHz). As I posted in that article we could also concludes Xenos, the Xbox 360 GPU, is twice as fast as it can setup 500M triangles/second (and peak triangle processing is much, much higher). But even a hobbiest knowledge of GPU technology makes it abundantly clear this is an inaccurate and sensational article, at best. Great for getting eyeballs on pages, great marketing, but extremely poor reporting.

This article is no better. A solid piece of information (comparing game emulation on the Mac) is muddied by teasers that misrepresent the content. For a site that prides itself as technically accurate and adhering to the rigors of scientific reporting with the desire to be taken as a serious source of information, this sort of reporting is unwelcomed.